by Daniels, Viv
Love,
Dylan
Love, he’d written. Love. At the time, I’d told myself that was silly. It had only been one day. But it hadn’t. All these emails, read in a row. It hadn’t been a day. It had been weeks of seeing him every day, working with him night after night, studying and researching and laughing and joking. That one afternoon in his bed had led from the runway of our entire acquaintance. He’d told me so at the time.
Not that it made the slightest bit of difference. I didn’t regret any of the choices I’d made except one—that I hadn’t been clear to him that we didn’t have a relationship. I might have saved him the hurt evident in his last email. But as he’d said at the reception, the pain didn’t last long. He’d slept with other girls.
Lots of girls, he’d said. Lots.
I was glad I’d gotten him on a roll, then. And if I didn’t quite have the same scoresheet, well, I’d had other things on my mind. School, work, transferring to Canton and figuring out how to afford it. There’d been Jason, who I supposed was my first real boyfriend. I liked him because he hadn’t complained about seeing me only once or twice a week. After about three months of that, though, he’d said he didn’t “see where this was going,” and I really couldn’t blame him. There had also been Sean, whom I’d met at a friend’s party one night and taken home. It was…uneventful, to say the least. I wasn’t sure how to tell the guy that the virgin I’d lost my own virginity to had made me come more.
After that, the whole enterprise seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. I’d even wondered if that thing with Dylan was sort of a fluke—exciting because it was new and naughty and forbidden by the rules of the summer camp. Maybe it was genetic that I only liked sex if it was somehow wrong. After all, that was how I’d been conceived.
I highlighted all the emails from Dylan, and my finger hovered over the delete button. I really should’ve gotten rid of them. Emails about a two-year-old project cluttering up my account, emails about a two-year-old fling that the other party had just this evening told me he’d gotten over in a week? What purpose did they serve?
But I didn’t. Curse you, unlimited storage space. You indulge me in all my worst habits.
***
After my first day of classes, I was coming down the wide steps in the bioengineering building’s center atrium when I caught sight of Dylan passing by at the bottom of the staircase. My steps faltered as he looked up, those blue eyes shining out of his tanned face like beacons.
“There she is.” His smile hadn’t changed as much as the rest of him. Last night, reading his old emails, I’d almost convinced myself he was still eighteen, with floppy hair and too-short pants. They were gone now, like his glasses. I missed those glasses—without them, there was nothing protecting me from the power of those baby blues. But as for the rest…I couldn’t complain. The cuteness evident in the teenager had morphed into full-blown hot. No, handsome. Handsome was safe. Objective. Hot meant I cared.
“Hi,” I said as casually as I could, coming down the last few steps to meet him on the tiled atrium floor.
He shifted his laptop from hand to hand. “How have your classes been?”
“Good,” I said. “Nothing too early, which I appreciate.”
“Lucky you.” He fell into step beside me as I headed for the door. “I have one at eight fifteen this term. Do you have your schedule on you?”
I pulled it up on my phone and handed it to him. He perused the list.
“Ah, Haverford. You’ll like him. Really no-nonsense. Try not to get the redhead TA for your section, though. He doesn’t like chicks.”
“‘Chicks’?” I pursed my lips.
“That’s what he calls you, and believe me, it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Dylan said, still looking over my schedule. “We have Transport Process Design together. People are going to be jealous you got in. Didn’t you lose a semester transferring in?”
How did he know that? “I got a few strings pulled.”
He cast me a glance over the top of my phone. “More than a few, I’d say.” He pushed the door open for me, which only gave me a second’s pause. “Org 3, Stats…too bad you didn’t get into Tissue Comp with me.”
“I need a few more prereqs.” We hit the sunny part of the pavement. “Part of the reason I transferred is because I could never get a full course-load at State.”
Dylan handed back my phone. “Then it sounds like you made the right choice, coming here.”
There was something odd in his tone, and the silence that fell in between us was even weirder. “Any other tips?” I forced myself to say.
“Um, don’t bother with the red book in Stats, make sure you sign up for the early lab in Org 3, and if you make friends with Dr. Chen, he’ll let you into the Photonics lab after hours.”
“Great,” I said with false cheerfulness. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” He shrugged. A shiny silver BMW pulled up to the curb. “Ah, my ride.”
As he opened the passenger door, I caught a glimpse of blonde hair and heard a female voice say, “Hey, honey.”
“Hey—oh, this is Tess McMann. She’s new to Canton.”
The girl leaned across the seat to smile up at me. Our identical eyes met and I reeled back, my entire body going cold despite the late summer sunlight.
From somewhere very far away, I heard the rest of Dylan’s introduction. Not that I needed to. I knew who she was.
“Tess, this is my girlfriend, Hannah Swift.”
My sister.
FIVE
“Honestly, Tess, I always thought your little plan of never running into him was kind of naïve,” Sylvia said, tying the black apron with the embroidered green leaf on it around her waist. “Canton’s not that big of a school.”
“We weren’t even supposed to be in the same department,” I argued. It was my first day of training at Verde, and Sylvia was running me through the basics before the lunch shift started.
She rolled her big brown eyes at me as she swept her hair off her neck and secured it with some carved leather clasp that looked like it came right from the prop department of Game of Thrones. Which, considering Sylvia, it probably had. “It’s not like he was an art history major or anything. You both study life sciences. You both study algae, for Pete’s sake.”
I shook my head and looked away. “Whatever. It’s fine. He’s not even mad. He told me all about how he got over me…”
Annabel Warren, Sylvia’s sister, paused as she passed us and set down her carafes of coffee on the stainless steel counter. “I’m sorry. Back that up a minute. He told you how he got over you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He said he was upset for a week and then he slept with lots of girls and then he was fine.”
Annabel threw back her head and gave a big, throaty laugh. “Oh yeah, he’s not mad at all. He just felt he had to point out his significant sexual prowess five seconds into seeing you for the first time in two years.”
That gave me pause. I pursed my lips, which made Annabel start laughing all over again. The sisters were a few years apart, and they both had the same peaches-and-cream skin and dark-red hair, but that was where the resemblance ended. Sylvia was tall and willowy, and when she wasn’t working at Verde, she was singing in a variety of local nightclubs, coffee shops, and Renaissance fairs. Annabel, several inches shorter to start with, had never lost the weight she’d gained after getting pregnant at sixteen. Her son, Milo, was seven now, and Annabel was juggling his care, two jobs, and the occasional night school class to try to get a degree in nursing.
“Tell her what happened the next time you saw him,” Sylvia singsonged as she filled ramekins with chopped chives.
“He gave me some pointers on my class schedule,” I said. She had me slicing lemons. I hated slicing anything. There was a reason I’d gotten into algae, not higher life forms.
“After that,” she prompted, blowing a tendril of hair out of her eyes.
I sighed. “We walked to the parking
lot, and his girlfriend was there to pick him up.”
“His rich, blonde, beautiful girlfriend,” Sylvia added. She looked at her sister. “I mean, if I were friends with this Dylan guy instead of you, I’d be congratulating him on how well his revenge scenario was working out. The only thing that could possibly have made it at all better for him is if instead of you being a gorgeous, brilliant transfer student with a fat academic scholarship, you’d become some dirty old bag lady.”
“Thanks for the gorgeous and brilliant part, at least,” I said.
“No problem, honey.” She went back to filling ramekins, and Annabel trotted off with her coffee jugs.
What neither of the Warren girls knew was that Hannah Swift wasn’t just a hot blonde girlfriend for Dylan to show off to me. She was my secret sister as well. It was funny. I’d often thought of Hannah—or at least, of the existence of Hannah, since I’d never met her before—when I was hanging out with Sylvia and Annabel. They lived together, with Milo, in a little two-bedroom apartment in a building not far from my mom’s. They’d both had some awful crap to wade through, especially after their parents kicked Annabel out of the house for getting pregnant and her creepy babydaddy left her in the lurch…but they’d had each other.
I also had a sister, but she was a stranger.
“Well, even if you’re right,” I said at last, “and he was trying to rub it in my face a little, it’s done. And actually, I’m happy for him. I was the one who walked away, remember? He didn’t do anything to hurt me. He deserves to, you know…”
“Sleep with lots of girls and have rich, blonde girlfriends with BMWs?” Sylvia asked.
I winced. Did we have to keep repeating it? “Exactly.”
Annabel swung by again. “Look lively, girls. The Ladies Who Lunch are back.”
“Who?” I asked.
Sylvia groaned. “Bunch of bitchy Canton sorority girls. They like to stop here after they’ve maxed out their daddies’ credit cards shopping.”
Annabel nodded. “They come in, only make special orders, and then complain about everything.” She shrugged. “On the plus side, they usually tip well.”
“Of course they do,” said Sylvia. “They aren’t paying the bills.” She considered me for a moment. “I think this will be your first assignment. Go fill their water glasses and give them their menus.” She handed me a pitcher. “Not that they’ll use them.”
I snagged a bunch of menus from the hostess stand on my way to the table. It was still early, so there weren’t many people in the restaurant, and the table of the Ladies Who Lunch was obvious to spot, given the shopping bags clustered around their chairs and the chattering of the occupants. Verde was located in what had once been an alley between two buildings, so the restaurant featured soaring glass ceilings like a greenhouse, brick walls, and industrial details like metal rivets and exposed pipe. Real trees lining every aisle softened the picture and lent an explanation to the restaurant’s name.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” I said as I started to pass out the menus. There were five of them, all blondes, all with giant designer sunglasses shielding their eyes from the light filtering down from the glass ceiling. Three took the menus and actually paged through them. Two more had their noses buried deep in their phones. I started filling glasses with water.
“Oh my God, Hannah, look. He’s texting me again.” One squealed and pointed her cellphone at the blonde beside her.
My grip tightened on the pitcher. It was Hannah. Dylan’s Hannah. My Hannah.
“Oooh,” Hannah teased her friend. “He wants you bad.”
I retreated to the kitchen at the fastest pace appropriate for a waitress.
“How’d it go?” Sylvia asked. “Did they ask you to pledge?”
“Syl,” I choked out. “It’s her. Dylan’s girlfriend. She’s a Lady Who Lunches.”
Sylvia and Annabel piled over to the pass-through and peeked out at the table. I kept my distance.
“Which one?” Annabel whispered.
“The blonde.”
Sylvia turned around and glared at me. “Honey, they’re all blonde.”
“Who is it?” Annabel asked. “I’m going to go out there and tell them about the specials.”
“The one in the coral jacket,” I said begrudgingly. The slim, stylish one in the designer sunglasses and the two-hundred-dollar shoes. The one with the perfect fall of silky hair and the eyes that look exactly like mine.
“Awesome.” Annabel straightened her apron. “Off to do some recon.”
As soon as she was gone, I turned to Sylvia. “I don’t want or need recon,” I said. Everything there was to know about Hannah Swift I already knew. She was my father’s real daughter. She was dating the boy I’d lost my virginity to. End of story. “I don’t care who he dates.”
“Did she recognize you when you went over there?” Sylvia asked, still staring out the pass-through.
No, thank God. I didn’t want us being friends. “She didn’t even look up from her phone,” I said. And it was a good thing, too. Who knew what would happen if she started contemplating how similar our eyes were?
Sylvia snorted. “Figures. Bunch of snobby little rich girls who can’t imagine their servants are actual people.”
“Would you stop it?” I asked. “We don’t get to hate this girl just because she’s dating some guy I slept with a long time ago.” And I didn’t get to hate her because her father paid for every single cent of her Canton education even while arguing that I shouldn’t get one.
Sylvia turned back to me, her eyes big and round. “Sorry! Geez, Tess, who made you Miss Manners?”
I wondered if that was why Dad had tried to talk me out of Canton. Because he knew Hannah was going there and he didn’t want to risk having us at the same school, maybe even living in the same dorm.
Annabel returned. “The usual.” She affected a high, squeaky voice and a valley girl accent. “‘Can I get the breaded filet without the breading and do you have any pomegranate today and can you roast the cauliflower without the truffle oil?’” She tossed the menus back in the holder and began entering the complicated orders into the computer. “Dylan’s girlfriend went easy on us though. Seared salmon salad, hold the nuts.”
Sylvia laughed. “Let’s not hold the nuts.”
“Sylvia!” I exclaimed. “What if she’s allergic?” Was she? Dad had never mentioned if Hannah had a nut allergy. Of course, he hardly ever mentioned her at all.
My friend nodded. “Good point. Can we put salt in her iced tea?”
“Sylvia!” Annabel and I cried in unison.
“You’re making me sorry I told you who she was,” I added. “Honestly, I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice girl.” Dylan wouldn’t be dating her otherwise, right?
“I’m sure she’s not,” Sylvia insisted. “What twenty-year-old owns a BMW? Spoiled brats who get everything they want all the time are never nice girls.”
“If I could, I’d give Milo everything he ever wanted,” Annabel pointed out. “You think that would ruin him?”
“Yes!” said Sylvia. “That’s why they call it ‘spoiled.’”
I didn’t say anything. I was sure Dad had given Hannah everything. He’d even gone so far as to make certain that her college experience wasn’t marred by the presence of her bastard half-sister. Lucky Hannah.
Somehow, we managed to change the subject to Milo’s collection of matchbox cars, and then a few more tables came in and Sylvia started showing me the ropes. I was to train at her side for today, then help expedite and assistant serve for two more shifts. After that, I’d get my own tables and my own tips. Sylvia was working the row of tables on the other side of the Ladies Who Lunch, and I made sure to keep my back to Hannah whenever we were out there. She’d only seen me for a moment at the car the other day, but I didn’t need her to ever see me again.
Sylvia was explaining the menu to a couple who clearly didn’t understand the meaning of the word “confit” when I heard Dylan’s name come float
ing up from Hannah’s table. I couldn’t help it—I diverted my attention away from Sylvia. After all, I knew what confit was.
“Seriously, girlfriend, in six months, you have remade that boy.” It was one of the Blondes, talking to Hannah.
“I take some credit for his newfound sense of fashion, yes,” Hannah was saying. “But I had great starting material.”
There was a chorus of snickering around the table. My fingers started tingling with a two-year-old memory of what Dylan’s body felt like beneath my hands. I straightened and squeezed my eyes shut before other parts started remembering too.
“That’s true,” said a second blonde. “He has kind of an Adam Scott thing going on. Geeky but adorable.”
I practically nodded in agreement before catching myself.
“If you say so,” said Blonde #1. “But Inever would have noticed the raw material under all that nerdy covering.”
“Oh, he’s still a nerd,” said Blonde #2. “We were out at dinner the other day, and I swear the only thing he wanted to talk about was seaweed-powered cars.” More laughter.
“Laugh it up,” said Hannah. “I’ll keep my nerd boy, thank you very much. When he’s the billionaire owner of that seaweed-powered car company, you’ll change your tune.”
“All hail Seaweed Zuckerberg and our very smelly future cars,” said Blonde #3 and I heard glasses clinking.
I breathed in very long and slow through my nose, then opened my eyes. Sylvia finished going over the menu with her table and gave them a few minutes to think it over. I trailed back to the kitchen with her in silence, my heart pounding, my cheeks inflamed.
“Oh. My. God,” Sylvia said when we got back to the kitchen.
I kept breathing.
“She might as well have just come out and said she was only dating him for his future earning potential!”
I swallowed thickly. “And they don’t get it at all!” I blurted. “‘Smelly cars?’ Come on! The whole point is to convert the seaweed to ethanol. It’s not going to smell like low tide or anything.”